New Additions to the Record Shelf

Whew, the hot weather is back, already 40 degrees Celsius with humidex... at barely noon. If I dare play any records today, I risk dripping sweat on the album sleeves and the stylus sinking clean through the molten vinyl. No A/C in my place, so I'm roughing it.

What the.... ?

But speaking of records, I added a couple more to the collection in recent weeks. After the passing of Dusty Hill not long ago, I decided to complete my ZZ Top collection - up to and including Eliminator, that is. I found two on vinyl, and another two on CD. The first was Fandango!, the half live, half studio LP from 1975, and the second was 1973's Tres Hombres, the disc that put the Texas trio on the map. The former boasted their big hit single Tush, plus the super chill Blue Jean Blues and the groovin' Heard It on the X; the latter album of course had the down and dirty La Grange, and other major favourites Waitin' for the Bus, Jesus Just Left Chicago, and Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers. All top-tier ZZ music. Fandango! was a gently used LP, while Hombres was a brand new fairly recent vinyl reissue.

Now though I wanted all of these ZZ Top acquisitions to be on vinyl, the prices on the last two were skyrocketing out of my price range, so I made the decision to get them on compact disc instead. Looking on the bright side, that sure saved me a lot of money. Both were brand new but very reasonably priced. These two were Rio Grande Mud, the band's second album, from '72 (so long ago!), and the '76 release,Tejas (which I learned is pronounced tay-haas - and is a native American word meaning "friends", and is the origin for the name of the state of Texas). The Mud CD had only a couple of familiar tunes, the classics Francine and Just Got Paid, so lots of music there to dive into and explore over time. Tejax is completely new to me. Sounds very cool though, so there'll be more beer-sipping listening sessions to come.

Then - something completely different. The three studio albums by the Spice Girls. Yep, you read right. A guilty pleasure, I guess you'd say. Ever since my young daughter started playing their CDs back in the 90's, I realized I sort of liked some of that bubblegum music. Hey, it's expertly crafted pop, much in the same vein as 60's and 70's pop - just in a more modern dancy way. I think a lot more people like Spice Girls than will admit it. Revisiting these albums after many years, it still remains obvious that Sporty (Melanie C) carries the group with her superior singing ability. They weren't all bad, but at least one, maybe two of the "girls" were clearly not hired for their talent.

 Anyway, a downloaded compilation of Spicy hits (from the early 2000's) wasn't really cutting it for me any more, so I finally bought their three studio albums for a pittance on used CD. No need to break the bank on this. But it's still light, fun boppy stuff that mostly holds up very well... certainly better than the vast majority of pop these days. So when I'm not spinning thrash metal albums, I'll bounce to the other end of the spectrum for some Spice. It picks me up when I'm feeling down in the dumps. Which is rather often these days. Happy, positive, fun tunes. 

My Favourite Music of the 70's

 A while back I wrote about 1960's music that made a life-long impression on me. While the 60's dazzled me the most with a small handful of artists like The Beatles, Monkees, Cream and The Doors, the 70's opened a floodgate of talent that was almost overwhelming. Many major 70's artists started their (recording) careers in the 60's and truly took off as established acts in the following decade.

The Who in full force circa sometime in the 1970s

A band like The Who is as much a 60's band as it is a 70's band; Townshend and crew began recording mid-60's - alongside other notables like The Beatles and The Kinks, and put out a handful of increasingly important albums before they really hit the bigtime in the 70's. Then The Who became simply massive, among the very top international acts for much of the decade. Big fan.

Creedence Clearwater Revival was sort of on the cusp... their short lifespan bridged the two decades, and I'd say they were well established before 1970 hit, though their celebrated Cosmo's Factory was released in that very year. A tough call on that one. Steppenwolf sort of fell into that same category, seeing success before the '70 mark, yet they still had some years to go and fizzle out. I've always enjoyed the gritty swamp-rock of CCR and the groovin' early stoner-rock of Steppenwolf.

Then there were Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, Supertramp, Elton John and David Bowie, who all began their recording careers in the late 60's, but found greater fame as they headed into the next decade. You could even throw Genesis into that pack, though I have nothing to say about them. Never a fan. As far as Bowie goes, I like his better-known music a lot, and that's about it. I just haven't dived very deep into his catalogue... yet. But most of those other bands and artists are still quite god-like to me. While I'm not much into Zeppelin nowadays, I still admire Floyd, Mac, Yes, Supertramp,and Elton... they were all part of my formative years as a young music fan. I still enjoy a bit of their music on occasion, though I generally steer away from the radio hits and aim for the deeper, and often surprisingly better, tracks.

Other artists, like Rush, formed in the late 60's, but took some time to land a record deal and release something, finally, in 1974. I would consider Rush a quintessential 70's band, since their signature heaviest, proggiest music came about during that time. Like the album A Farewell to Kings. For me, this was classic Rush. Though the early 80's saw a dramatic turn in their style and a massive surge in popularity, I lean toward the oldies (but I can bend the rule slightly to include 1980's Permanent Waves album, right?).

I can't even discuss the 70's without mentioning Van Halen, who single-handedly (or double, if you see how Eddie played guitar) changed music forever. Their first album is among the most successful debuts of all time. That self-titled disc influenced how future (and present-day, at the time) guitarists would play their instruments, and inspired a whole genre of flashy pop-metal during the 80's. Eddie's techniques and sounds, to this day, are textbook learning for young musicians. But don't stop at their first album... their second sneakily lays down track after track of equally mesmerizing music.

The Eagles have long been a sort of casual fave band of mine. Though I've got all their albums, I can't say I love everything they've done, but they did write some of my favourite songs of all time. Definitely prime 70's tunes. The Doobie Brothers, to me, make for the perfect greatest hits package. I can't say I've heard much beyond their biggest tunes, but I've owned their 1976 release Best of the Doobies on tape, CD, and vinyl ever since the early 80's. So I really like what little I know of them. Same with Foreigner, though in recent years, I've tried out some of their full studio albums... some pretty good fare when you dig for it.

Other stuff that truly influenced my musical tastes early on and still see some love on the turntable and CD player are the quirky and creative pop-hard rockers Cheap Trick, the gods of thunder and visual and aural excess Kiss, prog-hard rock oddballs Max Webster, Boston's seminal guitar rock classic first two albums, those raunchy and rowdy Aussie kings of three chords AC/DC, that Texas-fried boogie trio ZZ Top, the grizzly-sized Canuck rock group Bachman Turner Overdrive, quadrillion-selling pop-rock superstars Journey, Canadian progressive masters Saga and FM...

Though Black Sabbath and Judas Priest have carried on for ages, their heyday was during the 70's, when their albums Paranoid and Sad Wings of Destiny (among many others) laid the foundations of what was to become heavy metal. There was so much more to Sabbath than that one studio album; go back to their creepy debut and work through their impressive catalogue of doomy (and some not so doomy) hard and heavy gems. Even though my absolute favourite Sab album dropped in 1980, I still feel the 70's were loaded with the majority of their best music. And with Priest... well, they took what Sabbath did and refined and honed and tweaked those sounds to achieve their own unique brand of music, which was truly heavy metal (if you had any doubts about Sabbath being metal). Both monumentally important in my musical listening history.

Scorpions, hailing out of Germany, have been a hit with me since I first heard them in the late 70's. Though I have only heard a smattering of their early 70's material, I was heavily schooled in their blazing Teutonic metal stylings on classic late 70's masterpieces, Taken By Force and Lovedrive... and beyond. Guitar shredding and catchy heavy songs that'll never go out of fashion.

Many years after the fact, I learned to appreciate the 70's sounds of slick and smooth jazz-rock studio-rats Steely Dan, and even those pomp-rockers Styx, who simply never registered on my radar back in the day (too busy with Rush and Floyd, I guess). But the songwriting and musicianship is undeniable in both cases.

So there you have it... a whole lot of favourites from the 70's, and it only makes sense since I was a kid growing up back then, young and impressionable and the world was my oyster... and there was just SO MUCH great music back then. What happened? The 80's happened. Yes, a lot of cool 80's music, but also a lot of fluff and weirdness and copycats riding on the coattails of the truly great artists. New genres and bands galore and more music than there was really an audience for? Maybe.